In this episode of Transform Your Workplace, Brandon Laws sits down with Dr. Jack J. Phillips to talk about measuring the success of your projects or initiatives. Learn how to help your team get proactive with data, gain traction, pivot when it’s not working, and ultimately, make a measurable impact with current and future projects.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Jack J. Phillips is the author of Show the Value of What You Do: Measuring and Achieving Success in Any Endeavor and the Chairman of ROI Instutite, Inc. With over 27 years of corporate expertise, Dr. Phillips is an expert in the areas of accountability, measurement, and evaluation.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
FIVE LEVELS OF OUTCOMES
Success has five levels of outcomes. When it comes to virtually any project, there must be measurable value. The first level is reaction, and it’s all about gathering information about the learners’ reactions to their training. Next, training managers will collect employee responses both before and after a training to determine what they learned.
The third level is application, or “doing what’s needed to make the project work,” and the fourth is impact, which Jack J. Phillips says is the most critical of all levels of success. Lastly, accountability is the level of success that makes us ask, “Is it worth it? Are we getting enough value out of this project to cover the cost of it?”
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Focus on the Impact
“Ask where you want to end up and start with that in the beginning. And where we’d recommend is impact. That’s the one that people can see and really want. And so you start with that end in mind and clearly define measures. Ask, ‘Where do I want to be when this thing’s done?’ And then, when you do that, you also make sure that what [you’re] doing is the right solution to get there. And second, I have my whole project team of the people involved in it to help work toward that goal of getting to that impact that we need.”
What about HR?
“I was head of HR for eight years, and I understand that field so much. What we have to do is to show the value of this function. We gotta move from the classic look at HR — from the administrative, legalistic, and compliance — to a contributor to the business. We’re a business driver, and it’s not always perceived that way by the senior executives.”
Looking at the Numbers
“The impact data is right in the system. […] They can report it to us through an action plan, or even on the questionnaire because at Impact, it’s already there. It’s things like sales and customer complaints, rejects, mistakes, errors, waste, rework, accidents, incidents, absenteeism, turnover, you know, all of that stuff is there. It’s just a matter of getting that data. Then, we have to sort out the effects of what we do from other influences. That’s our critical credibility issue there. When we analyze the data, how much have we contributed with our project?”
Being Proactive with Data
“They don’t ask for it, so I don’t work on it. And so the problem is, when they do ask for it, they want it quickly. If they say, ‘You put this huge employee engagement system in place here, it looks great. Could you show me the ROI?’ — you’re now defensive. […] So our biggest challenge there, as you just pointed out, is let’s be proactive. Don’t let them come and ask us. Don’t let them even guide us where we need to go. We need to sort out where we need to go. We don’t need an executive telling us how to measure the success of something. We can do it ourselves, and it’s much easier to drive this bus on your own and not let someone else be driving it for you.”
Cost or Investment?
“If they see it as a cost, they’ll trim it, eliminate it, control it. And the two words that we saw during the pandemic were “pause it” and “freeze it.” Those are just nice ways of killing something. Now, the consequence of that is that we don’t have good business partners out there. We don’t have as much influence. We don’t have as much support. And we’re not getting enough budget. If they see it as an investment, they’ll protect it, they’ll enhance it, they’ll support it.”
Making it Work
“See, it’s usually not the content of the program that’s the problem. It’s not the nature of our project. It’s usually something that broke down out there in the organization. It wasn’t supported so well, something wasn’t done so well, but we see that, so it helps us now make it better. So now the headline is, ‘Here’s a program we thought was adding business value, but it wasn’t and now it is with these changes.’ […] By the way, usually if something’s not working, a lot of people out there already know it’s not working.”
LEARN MORE
Get Jack J. Phillips’ book, Show the Value of What You Do, on Amazon or find free resources related to this episode here.